The Modern Age (1915-1946)

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The Modern Age(1915-1946)
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Historical Background

• US rose to become a world power politically and
  economically
• However, Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression,
  WWI and WWII significantly affected the mood of
  the American people
• Created fragmentation in society, sense of
  isolation of individuals, and sense of
  disenchantment with government
• People no longer trusted their government

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• Devastation from wars, depression, economy
  replaced Americas characteristic optimism with
  disillusionment
• Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John
  Dos Passos lost their sense of idealism
• Replaced with overriding feeling of doom and a
  view of the world as vulgar, violent, and
  spiritually empty.

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Expatriates

• Because many people were disillusioned with life
  after W W I and II, many American writers became
  expatriates
• Left US to live elsewhere (Paris)
• Gertrude Stein called them the lost generation
• Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound, Eliot
• Searching for a new source of hope

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Birth of Modernism

• After W W I, most people lost sense of optimism
  felt uncertain about future and disillusioned
• Modernism---the international movement that
  developed in the postwar period where authors
  felt the need to break with the past and make it
  new

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New ways of seeing demand new ways of saying

• Unconventional literary techniques such as no
  punctuation, no capital letters, endless
  sentences, and obscure phrasing made works
  difficult to understand

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Case in point

• Gertrude Stein once called the comma servile
  and refused to have anything to do with it.
• Thurber often fought with his editor Harold Ross
  about commas.
• Thurber saw commas as so many upturned office
  chairs unhelpfully hurled down the wide-open
  corridor of readability.
• (Truss 68 ,80)

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• Stein againthe question mark was the most
  completely uninteresting of all marks of
  punctuation
• It is evident that if you ask a question you ask
  a question but anybody who can read at all knows
  when a question is a question I never could
  bring myself to use a question mark, I always
  found it positively revolting, and no very few do
  use it. (1935)

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Characteristics of Modernism

• Capture modern life (fragmented)
• Attempt to find common ground in a world no
  longer unified in belief
• Emphasize individual perception and experiences
  as an attempt to find shared meaning of humanity
• Omitted traditional forms of stories (exposition,
  resolutions, etc..)
• Themes were implied, not stated (forced readers
  to draw their own conclusions)

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Authors and their messages

• Wharton and Fitzgerald show the values and
  appearances of the privileged are false and
  destructive
• Sinclair Lewis criticized hypocrisy in lives and
  values of middle class
• Dreiser showed precarious lives of working class
• Steinbeck glorified lives and values of oppressed
  outcasts living in poverty
• Hemingway and John Dos Passos cast doubt on
  martial glory and patriotism
• Henry James emphasized sensibility and human
  consciousness

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Literary Traditionalism

• Despite new ideas and new techniques, many
  writers continued American tradition
• Continued to use characteristic American themes
  combined with modernist techniques
• Regionalism and realism still dominate
  traditional writing

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Pluralism in literature

• Pluralism---existence of more than one group,
  culture, religion, sex, etc. in American
  literature
• Predominantly male view point gave way to ethnic
  minorities, women, and religious groups

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Harlem Renaissance

• 1921---rise of African American writers
• Harlem, New York

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Read the author info. and poems on pages 796-803

• Construct a Triple Venn Diagram where you compare
  2 poems and a short story
• (Select As I Grew Older as one and Dust Tracks
  on a Road (p 902) as the second. You get to
  select the third poem.)
• Tell of the similarities and differences between
  the poems. (themes)
• Discuss theme, language, struggles, aspirations,
  etc.

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Triple Venn Diagram
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Consciousness of Experience

• Despite fragmentation and sense of isolation,
  modern writers were attempting to find common
  ground in which we all recognize a shared
  humanity
• Society is after all made up of its people and
  each person has a story to tell
• Experiences are exact details of what makes us
  human
• If one becomes conscious of human consciousness,
  one begins to put the world back together into
  meaning we can share

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New Approaches

• Stream of Consciousness Technique
• Re-creating the natural thought flow of a
  character (not necessarily linear)
• Ideas presented are done in a way that is natural
  for the character (natural associations)
• Incongruity
• Joining of opposites to create a situation that
  is totally unexpected

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Incongruity

• the juxtaposition of the "expected" with the
  "unexpected." For example, the one-liner is based
  on this structure "Never raise your hand to your
  children it leaves your midsection unprotected."
  
• serious sentence meets unexpected ending. The
  shock is our recognition of this incongruity.
  There is virtually no opportunity to warn the
  reader.

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Modern Poetry

• Experimental in form
• Beginnings in Whitmans new world view
• Owes a debt to symbolist movement (French late
  19th cent.)
• Some reworking of traditional forms
• Pervasive themes---the age of anxiety
  disillusionment
• Nature and possibilities of human relationships
  and the complex emotional and psychological
  elements that bear on them

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Symbolist Movement

• All external objects are symbols of deeper, truer
  reality
• Unrelated things are connected by surprising,
  secret links
• Poet avoids directly stating meaning instead
  relying on the mood created by highly suggestive
  symbols
• Variety of styles
• Relies more on free association than on logical
  sequence

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Poets and their work

• Imagists Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams,
  E. E. Cummings (typographical appearance of
  poetry on page is as important as poems sound and
  meaning of its words)
• T. S. Eliot---man who cannot love and spiritually
  barren world that only God can infuse with
  meaning
• Pound---pervasive greed corrupts the possibility
  of fruitful human relationships